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Conversation W/Harry Binswanger -Individual rights: Everything You Wanted to Know | Yaron Brook Show · Yaron Brook Show

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So I'm assuming you're going to pretty much.
• 0:04
  Speaker 2: Your polity order, pat.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: And individual loss.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: This is the show, all right, everybody, welcome to your
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: own book show on this Monday, December first, and I
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: am on it, and please to have philosopher have you
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: been Swanger here with me. Harry is of course one
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: of our a leading objective's philosopher. He teaches for the
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: Inland Institute at AARU and the grad through a grat
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: grad program at the institute. He manages the heavy been
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: swang at list hbl uh and what else do we
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: want to say?
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: Uh?
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: Kind of as a highlight because I think everybody knows uh.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: And of course he was a personal friend of mine
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: man's and got to know her quite well towards the
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: end of her life. So and was on the board
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: of there our initia for thirty six years. So Harry,
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: thank you, thanks for joining.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Me, thanks for having me.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: Sure So, as I told you guys earlier and last week,
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: you know, get your philosophy questions. All the questions that
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: I've punted on and said, oh, asked a philosopher, or
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: the questions I gave not that great answers. This is
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: the time to ask those questions. We've got a philosopher
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: with us, so somebody who can give you the definitive
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: answers on these questions. But we're going to talk about
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: We're going to spend the first thirty forty five minutes
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: talking about individual rights, which are really the key political concept,
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: the most important idea in politics. So maybe we can
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: start them. Who can start with why is that? Why
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: individuates so important?
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Well, they're the principle that unlocks the answer to every
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: political question. And the understanding of individual rights that the
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: average objectivist has is sufficient to get agreement on virtually
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: any policy issue that comes up, like say, social security,
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: should it be saved, should it be eliminated? Or what,
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: well it violates individual rights, it should go? Or what
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: about the draft violates the right to life? It can't
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: be the government can't do it. Eminent domain. The government
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: wants to put up a post office, they can't do
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: it because there are private property rights. The government can't
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: seize your property for any reason. So from welfare to immigration,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: to gun control to socials, every topic is resolved by
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: this one idea that you have a right to your
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: life and freedom.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: And so where do these rights come from? I mean,
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: this is obviously something that what do we have? What
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: is it doing? Okay, this is something that particularly conservatives
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: always make a big deal out of it. Right, you know,
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: without God? Where the rights come from? Or I think
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: I think it was Noah Harari, who is this overrated
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: philosophy story and who his books are best sellers. And
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: I heard him once say, you know, you open up
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: a human being, you dissect a human being, they're all
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: rights inside, They're not there. So so what is this
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: idea of rights? And people take them seriously? So where
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: did they come from? Where do we get in concept
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: of right?
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: That's something that early on in the sixties when I
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: came into objectivism, which was a fletioning philosophy that I
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: thought it was very clarifying because it seemed like rights
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: were either possessions that you had attributes of your possessions,
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: or else they were just conventions. They were just Congress
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: decided to call this your rights, so it's your right.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: And nine Ran said that rights are moral principles. So
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: they're like justice or honesty or integrity. They are moral principles,
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: in this case, designed to tell you what a just
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: society is, how to organize society under objective law to
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: allow for moral behavior on the part of its citizens.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: They're not attributes of you. They're not things that you
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: have in your possession. They are principles of how human
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: beings ought to interact in a social organization.
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: So what do you need in order to come up
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: with rights? To induce the concept of rights.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: It's a very hard concept to get. Apparently, some of
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: us think itself evident. Thomas Jefferson describe them as self well. Actually,
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: you know, the first draft of the Declaration did not
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: use the term self evident. He said, we hold these
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: trees to be sacred and undeniable. Okay, which is interesting.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: Self evident has a better ring, but sacred and undeniable
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: are closer to a proper formulation. Anyway, It's not easy
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: to get yet, because you have to have a philosophic base.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: And the most important philosophic base you need, well, I
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: guess there's three, but the one I'm thinking of is
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: egoism selfishness. It's your life is your own to live,
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: and that was never held except by the ancient Greeks.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: But once Christianity got going, that was anathema. A little later,
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: I can read you some quotes to illustrate the general
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: idea of man that lies behind either slavery or freedom,
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: and it's a different philosophic base. The other thing that
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: goes along with egoism, whether two are related, conjoin things
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: reason and free will. If you don't accept free will,
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: you can't accept political freedom, because then there's no such
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: thing as you making up your own mind, you acting
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: on your own decision. There's just various things influencing you.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: There's no such idea as the independent autonomous self. And
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: that's what rights are all about, protecting the independent autonomous
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: self ability to choose for itself as long as he
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: or she respects the same freedom of others.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: And why is reason important to you?
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: Why is reason important anywhere? Because you're blind without it,
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: there's no other way of knowing anything, of knowing what's true,
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: what's right, what exists. So it's particularly valuable or important
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: in the theory of rights, because that's what rights exist
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: to protect the reasoning mind. Have some quotes from John Locke,
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: who developed the theory of rights more than anybody else
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: is one man. John Locke who described rights in terms
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: of freedom sorry, and in terms of reason, and I
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: have some quotes from that. Maybe now is in okay,
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: time to read them? Yeah, because they're.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: Yep, I lost your sound. I lost your sound, Harry.
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure what's that? Can you hear me? Harry?
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: I can't hear you. I think you can't hear me.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: Something disconnected. I can't hear you. Is that? But now
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: I ask you? Okay?
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: So yeah, I saw some some message go by.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was trying to share.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: I was saying that in the clutter here. It's going
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: to take a while for me to find the quotes
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: from Locke. But what he was saying is that the
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: nature has a law to govern it, natural law, he
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: called it, and that law is reason. Reason is the reason,
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: the cause why there is such a thing as rights.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: Animals have to be dealt with by force because you
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: cannot address their minds. So if reason is our means
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: of communicating and of gaining the knowledge we need to survive,
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: then anything that stops reason, paralyzes reason, negates reason, interferes
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: with reason, is anti life and therefore immoral. Now, it
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: wasn't until an Rand that we got that fuller understanding
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: of the role of reason as really fundamental in a
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: theory of rights. And it wasn't until ign Rand that
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: we got the idea that free will and reason are synonymous. Yeah,
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: so she really completed what Locke began.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: Why Why was the conception of rights associate with natural
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: rights associate with religion? And that it's sometimes I mean,
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: is that lock?
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: Yes, it is lock. And the quote from Locke, if
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: I can find it here, is that we're all the
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: workmanship of one omnipotent and all knowing creator, and we
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: are his to dispose of. So that that's why you
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: can't use force against your neighbor because he belongs to God.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: So you're interfering with God's property rights. He owns you.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: You're his slave, and therefore nobody unless they have a
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: deputation from God, which he thought was ridiculous that no
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: one could claim that no one can do things with
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: you because you're God's So it's like when slave owner
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: can't interfere with the other slave owner. It's not exactly
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: a secular base. On the other hand, let me just
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: jump in here to say Locke had a peculiar attitude
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: about religion and Christianity and God. He thought God gave
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: us the earth to live and prosper and enjoy ourselves
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: in so he thought God wanted us to be happy egoists.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: Oh, okay, that's really unusual.
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  Speaker 1: Most religionists don't think that.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: And did he think that then God left us alone?
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: Or was he omnipresent God that interfered and action.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: I think he was more of a deist. He wasn't
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: as much of a deist as the founding fathers or
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: because he was one hundred years earlier, and it takes
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: a long development before people get the courage to really
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: question these things that seem unquestionable. But he Yeah, he
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: did not advocate prayer or submission. But he did think
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: that we are owned by God. He's our like our parent.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: We have to obey him. So whether that's understandable, the
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: people you know, associate it writes with the religion.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: Did he with the other people that picked up on
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: the concept of rights, either before him or at the
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: same time.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a fascinating group before him called the Levelers,
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: and their names you never heard of, probably, like the
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: best one is Richard Overton. Richard Overton, and I have
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: here a writing by him. It's called an Arrow against
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: All Tyrants, and he wrote this while he was imprisoned
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: in the Tower of London for rebelling against Cromwell. And
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: I just sorry if I read a couple of fairly ships.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: This is forty years before Locke wrote. And he says,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: no man hath power over my rights and liberties, and
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: I over no man. I may be but an individual,
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: enjoy myself and my self property, and may write my
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: self no more than myself, or presume any further. If
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: I do, I am an encroacher and invader upon another
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: man's right. And this one I, like every man, by nature,
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: is a king, priest and prophet in his own natural
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: circuit and compass, where no second man may partake but
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: by deputation, commission, and free consent from him whose natural
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: right and freedom it is. So I think that's really
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: the first time because the if we look at what
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: a right is, people who have been educated today don't
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: really get the idea of a right. A right is
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: not a permission, it's not an entitlement. It's not a
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: direction to do what's right. It says you are the
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: one to choose. It's a moral sanction of your freedom
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: to choose, your freedom of action, not saying it's not ethics.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: It's the border between ethics and politics. So you have
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: a right to be obnoxious, you have a right to
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: be rude, You have a right to do all kinds
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: of nasty things to people, as long as thereby you
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: do not deprive them of their ability to act freely.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: So it's not the same as morality. It's the moral
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: basis of government, is what it really is. And iin
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: RAN's great identification is rights protect your freedom of action.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: And freedom is the absence of initiated physical force. So
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: rights say, within my circuit and compass, within the area
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: of my rights, I am the one to decide. And
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: that has to be that way, because you can't say
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: within that compass. You must do the right thing decided
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: by whom YEA. So it is a circuit and compass.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: It's like I look at it as circles that exhaust
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: a field. Like everybody has his own land, and no
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: two people's land are on top of each other. You
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: have a land, your boundary ends where his begins. And
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: it's the same with rights.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: And is Lucke's conception of rights the same in terms
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: of this bridge between morality and politics.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: Yes, And that's what's the big thing. But both the
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: levelers here is that you are a king in your
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: own area. I mean you are autonomous, You're a sovereign.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: Nobody can interfere with you in your area. And by
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: the same token, you can't step out of your protected
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: area and tell somebody or make somebody else do what
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: you want him to do. All interactions have to be voluntary.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: And Iran stressed that I think she was the first
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: to identify only physical force can violate a right. You
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: can't violate a right by microaggression or by offensive speech,
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: or by any form of speech except where it's like
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: I'm going to punch your face in if you don't
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: do this. Ye, a threat is different. But just speech
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: you know about your ideas or what you believe is
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: not rights violating. But this is hard for people who
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: are secondhanders to get. So if you've read The Fountain
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: the Head, you know Peter Keating, he's a real dependent type.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: I call him clingers. For him, for the someone to
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: disapprove of him is equivalent to a punch in the noose. Yeah,
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: you cannot abide it. So he doesn't see any big
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: distinction between physical force and a frown.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And you see that with these kids who've been
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: raised in a secondhanded way, and they've elevated emotions to
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: you know, to the primary activity in life. And therefore
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: if you offend them, that's as if you've slapped him
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: in the face or beating them up.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, if I'm and you know the language of today.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: We need access to health care. This poor guy doesn't
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: have access to healthcare, meaning what is the door shut?
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: You can't get in the door. No, it means nobody's
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: giving him free healthcare. And since healthcare is a good
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: that has to be produced by the time and effort
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: and mind of some individuals, his complaint is I don't
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: have access to your wallet and your brain. That's that's
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: a completely anti rights viewpoint.
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: So going back to the level is who were these
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: these people?
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: There were I didn't really get into that. I said
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: about four of them. It's a small movement. It's about
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: four of them, and uh, Richard Overton is the name
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: to remember. There's William Wallwin and a couple of others.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: They were in the first half of the seventeenth century,
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: which means sixteen twenty, sixteen forty and Locke wrote in
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: sixteen eighty eight, so they're way ahead of him. And
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: they had the idea, there's an area within which you
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: are sovereign and no one can interfere with you, and
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: you can't go into someone else's area where they are sovereign.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: And that is so different from the ideas before, which
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: word that while society makes rules and you have to
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: follow the rules, or you belong to God, or you
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: belong to your neighbor, and you have to do the
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: right thing, and if you don't, you go to jail.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: Do you know where the name levelers comes from? Where
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: they level of their enemies.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: Their enemies looked upon them as wanting to bring down
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: the high and mighty, But the only the only high
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: and mighty they wanted to bring down were kings and auristics.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: They it was right to be. It meant all men
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: are created equal. That was the leveling. So it was
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: a good movement. And I only know about them because
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: a Cambridge historian who is an objective is named Brian.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: Your rush gave me a bunch of writings of these people.
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: I've never heard of them.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: Okay, it's an objective. Is Cambridge is Damian? That's good
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: to know. Yeah, that's impressive. So and and then from
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: Locke there's a level is and there's lock and then
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: the final one and then the final fathers. Is there
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: anything in between there? Does anybody else pick up on
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: this concept and and and really develop it? Well?
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: I should say to stress what you just said. The
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: Founding Fathers were one hundred percent Locke. In Thomas Jefferson
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: wrote to his son and said, if you're only going
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: to read one book, it should be John Locke's Second
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: Treatise of Government. And actually I urge everyone to read
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: it because it's really good. They're bad things in it,
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: but on the whole it's the document that created the
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: United States. And John Locke actually wrote the state Constitution
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: of South Carolina and he was good in economics also,
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: So that I just want to stress the Founding Fathers
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: did put Locke into practice, and that's what created this country,
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: no question about that. What happened after that BAM coming
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: out of England Will Scotland David Hume. David Hume said
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: there's two kinds of knowledge. There's the relations among ideas,
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: which is all just a matter of how you define
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: things and doesn't mean anything. And then there's matters of
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: fact about which we can't know anything. We don't know
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: if the next step we will fall through the floor
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: into the center of the earth. We don't know if
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: something that's falling from the sky and looks like snow
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: might nonetheless burn us and taste like salt. So you
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: can't know the future at all. If it's a matter
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: of fact. If you're saying, well, it's geometry or it's logic,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: or it's deduction, yeah that's certain, but it's no good
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: doesn't apply to reality. So he came along and said
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: all this rights talk, I mean, he didn't address rights
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: in Britain, but all the ethical notions the philosophers are
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: hot air. There is no ethics. You cannot prove any ethics.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: Reason has nothing to say about ethics, and there are
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: nothing to say about politics because political philosophy is just
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: applied ethics. So that didn't catch on that much. He
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: was very famous, but he didn't catch on that much
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: until the German philosopher Immanuel Khan glombed onto that and said, hey,
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: Hume is right, but we don't have to be able
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: discouraged about it. We can redefine everything so that the
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: subjective is really the objective. The subjective. If enough people
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: hold it, becomes as good as we can get for objective.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: So he's the father of socializing consciousness. He's the guy
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: that's the promoter of Volkes popularly Volkes Day. The voice
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: of the people is the voice of God. So everything socialist, collectivist,
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: fascist communists that is in the world today is due
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: to the influence of Emmanuel Khan, who took hume and
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: socialized it. Yeah, one person might be wrong, but if
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: everyone thinks it, that's as good as true. Yeah, so
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: that you can't have rights on that basis. And he
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: was also a determinist, so we already saw that you
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: can't protect freedom of choice if there is no choice.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: And then after him they came a bunch of people
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: carrying his ideas out like a goost. Compt yep, the
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: guy who coined the term altruism. I never read Compt
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: until about a year and a half two years ago,
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: I picked up his book. I was amazed at how
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: breezen it is. You know, how he compresses his ethics
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: into one little phrase that he repeats over and over
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: again live for others.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: Yep, he's the most explicit ever of all of the philosophers.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: In terms of altruism, it just.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: Live for others and what are the others living for others?
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: Other others? Yeah, I mean it's it's Einran described that
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: once as an exchange of unwanted Christmas presents. Uh, and
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: then Hagel was put Marx and compt together. Well, it's
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: particularly Marx and the British Hegelians, which I've read and
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: I've got one of their works right here. Really Nazis,
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: they're really horrible. Hegel said, yeah, there are rights. Rights
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: is what the government has against you. What you have
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: in relation to the government is duties. So you are
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: Bradley says it the British Hegel and he says about him, saying,
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: I am an organ of the state. I Am just
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: a sell on the body of society. And he's, you know,
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: he's rabid, determinist collectivist. Goes right from Bradley into the
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: socialist experiment in England and German Gliens of course created
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: Nazi Germany, which few people will tell you is an
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: abbreviation from naz Channel's Socialist Deutscher arbeider Parti National Socialist
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: German Workers Party National Socialist German Workers Party, so Hegel
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: was very influential. He was the philosopher of the middle
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds. The world's philosopher.
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: Is the nationalist movement that comes around in the mid
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: nineteenth century a consequence of Hegel.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: And today the whole tribalist of the Maga versus the
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: progressives is right out of Hegel. It's the identification of
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: the individual with the state or the tribe in this case.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: So what you need, I'd like to read you, you know,
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: sort of wrapping up this part. I'd like to read
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: you some quotes from two opposite viewpoints and ask yourself
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: what supports rights and what is against rights?
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: Is that?
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: Okay, yep, all right? So the first one is from
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: the badly named Pope Innocent, the third writing in eleven
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: ninety eight. Now he wrote this a few years. I
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: think they made him pope because he wrote this pamphlet
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: on the misery of man. And this is just the
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: most amazing language, and this is what was mainstream. Man
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: is made of mud and ashes? Why are you proud
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: of mud? Wherefore art thou exalted? What are you, oh ash,
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: that you should boast? It gets you into these into
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: the mood for it. Oh the vile ignobility of human existence. Oh,
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: the ignoble condition of human vileness. Considered the grasses in
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: the trees. Out of their substance, they produce flowers, leaves,
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: and fruit, but man brings forth lice, eggs, lice and
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: stomach worms. They yield oil, wine, and balsam, whereas man
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: spews forth sputum, urine and excrement. In much wisdom turned
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: out to epistemology. In much wisdom is much vexation. And
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. There is scarcely anything
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: so lowly or simple to understand that man can thoroughly
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: grasp or fully understand. Man perhaps understands one thing, one
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: truth perfectly, namely that nothing is understood perfectly. I got
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: two more the rich man, No, that's sense. Sorry, there's
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: a blemming against the rich man, and how unhappy he is.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: But this is the one I wonder you. Human life
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: is constant fear, trembling, horror, pain, sadness, restlessness, and the
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: conclusion that he draws happy. Are they who die before
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: birth experienced death before tasting life?
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: I mean he is a perfect spokesman for Christianity.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: Yes, that's why they made him pope. He knew how,
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: he knew how to write. Now here's the view that
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: underlies rights. I stand here on the summit of the mountain.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: I lift my head and I spread my arms. This
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: my body and spirit. This is the end of the quest.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: I wish to know the meaning of things. I am
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: the meaning. I wish to find a warrant for being.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: I need no warrant for being, and no word of
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: The judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: can find the truth. It is my will which chooses,
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: and the choice of my will is the only edict
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: I must respect. I know not if this earth on
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: which I stand is the core of the universe, or
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: I know not, and I care not. Or I know
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: what happiness is possible to me on earth, And my
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: is not the means to any end. It is the end.
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: It is its own good, it is its own purpose.
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: So that's the kind of attitude, a metaphysical view of
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: man in existence that you need to say. I have
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: a right to my life. You and the state and
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: God keep your paws off.
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: And any man could write that.
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: So that's from Anthem. But she wrote in nineteen thirty five.
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: So very early, you know, even in philosophical development. So
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: much was already developed even when she wrote Anthem.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: In one sans, one of the big things about rights
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: that I wanted to mention was the objective is theory,
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: is that rights are not subjective, you know, just opinions
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: in somebody's mind, and they're not intrinsic. They're not possessions
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: or attributes. You can't cut up a person and find
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: his rights. They are objective, which is the relationship of
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: a rational thinking mind to perceptual reality. So it's neither
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: just reality by itself or the mind by itself, but
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: it's the mind grasping reality that's objectivity. And I once
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: asked her when did you come up with that that
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: tri economy, where no other philosopher ever said that they
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: only had the idea of subjective or dogmatic in effect,
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: and so when did you come up with the three?
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: And she said, oh, I've always thought that, isn't it obvious?
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: No, no, nobody else all of human history. Yeah, that's amazing.
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: That's amazing. So talk a little bit about I advanced
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: contribution to the concept of rights. I mean you've already
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: talked some about.
• 35:36
  Speaker 3: That, Yeah, but I think nail it down, yeah, because
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: because really, I mean actually before that, so rights somewhat
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: survive in the American legal system in the nineteenth century.
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: Without really much intellectual support. I take it there really
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: no thinkers. So really is kind of momentum out of
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: the Enlightenment and out of the founders. And then what
• 36:00
  Speaker 2: happens the concept I mean in America, particularly that it
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: gets or in our legal system it starts getting perverted and.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: They use altruistic rights inflation like iin Ran talks about
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: FDRs for freedoms. You have a right to be free
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: from fear, like where your next meal is coming from.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: You have a right to an education. You have a
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: right to respect, even if you're no damn good and
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: don't deserve respect. You have a right to all these
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: things that require other people not to have rights. And
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: one of the most powerful statements is so simple that
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: Iron Ran made. There's no right to violate rights. Your
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: right cannot impose an obligation on somebody else. The only
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: obligation that you're right sympose on him is that he
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: cannot invade your rights, not that he has to give
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: you something. But the the concept of rights got inflated away.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: You know that, like the currency. Just you want to
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: destroy the dollar prints lots of dollars, fiat dollars, phony dollars,
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: and that's what has destroyed the currency, and the same
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: thing has destroyed the concept of rights. So now you
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: have a right to everything, which means that there are
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: no rights.
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: And and do you think that was unconsciously that is
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: what was was Was it a program of the progressives
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: or somebody to to kind of inflate it just happened.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: No, it was their belief. If you start from if
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: you get convinced that no one can help what he
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: does and that there's no objective truth, there's just my
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: truth in your truth, then you have to start chipping
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: away at rights and you have to redefine them as claims,
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: claims from the government to get things from the government,
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: like the right to healthcare and the right to an education,
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: all these things, the so called positive rights, which mean
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: the rights to things that you didn't earn. Someone else
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: has to supply you with at the price of his slavery.
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: So no, it's not it's not a conspiracy. These thinkers
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: were convinced by Cotton Hegel. And if you hold that's
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: what's really hard for some of us to grasp, including me,
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: People really believe these bad philosophies. They don't just say it.
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: They can contradict it, you know, and they do, but
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: they really believe in some way. Now, there is no
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: objective truth. There's just what the power structure in the
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: present form, what the power structure is conditioning you to
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: think it's true. But me and my little band know
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: isn't true, or feel differently, I shouldn't say no, isn't true.
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: It's not our truth. There's your truth in my truth,
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: but no the truth. And so I remember once I
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: spoke at the University of Florida in the eighties and
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: I spoke against religion. I debated a creation scientist, and
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: there were a number of scientists, professors in the audience,
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: and at the end of that formal debate, in the
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: question period, they were clearly on my side, and I
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: was a hero to them. But then it came out
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: that I believed in rational certainty, and suddenly they were
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: against me.
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: So it's the philosophy combined with there is one psychological thing.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: If you screw up people's education and they're not heroically independent,
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: so you don't teach them how to think, you do
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: everything you can to prevent them from thinking, which is
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: called progressive education, then you're not going to be equipped
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: to figure things out, and you're going to be frightened
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: and you're going to look for a solace in a
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: herd that will approve of you. And that is an
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: indirect psychological kind of cause. But it comes from the
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: where did John Dewey come from?
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: Philosophy?
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: He was a philosopher. He both founded the progressive education
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: movement at Teachers College at Collembia, and he was a
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: philosopher with a PhD in the Philosophy department of Columbia.
• 41:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so let's talk about advanced contribution and oh yeah,
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: how she really you know? It places individual rights on
• 41:17
  Speaker 2: solid ground.
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: So well, first of all, she shows she gives a proof,
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: and the proof is very simple. It involves one step
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: that I didn't emphasize too much, but let's do that now. Freedom.
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: Freedom is the ability to act without being subject to
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: physical force. The opposite of freedom is slavery compulsion force.
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: So she defined the right as a moral principle defining
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: and sanctioning man's freedom of action in a social context.
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: So she connects rights to a claim to freedom, and
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: freedom is the absence of being forced or coerced physically,
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: and she connects physical force to the mind by negation.
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: Force is anti mind. It's one of her statements in
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: Atlas Shrug. Force is anti minded, negates and paralyzes the mind.
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: So if rights protect your ability to use your mind
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: and act on it, force is the only way you
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: can stop a person from doing that. You can't do
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: it by saying, hey, look, don't think so hard. I'm
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: gonna think. Oh you can't stop me, Well, I can
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: hit you over the head. Yeah, And that's what takes
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: your freedom of action away. So she connects rights to freedom,
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: freedom to force, force to the destruction of the mind.
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: And then the mind is man's means of survival, which
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: other people had grasped also, but she emphasizes it much
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: more than the average person did. But if it's our
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: means of survival, and survival is the ultimate purpose of
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: the life is to go on living and do things
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: achieve things that promote your survival. Then it's the evil
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: is to prevent you from surviving, to kill you. In fact,
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: that's the ultimate evil, and that's what violations of rights do.
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: So rights protect your life, their life protecting, because their
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: mind protecting, and your mind is your tool of survival,
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: your basic tool of survival. So she may that chain
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: of connections which no one had so clearly delineated. Some
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: people you've never heard of. Probably well, you because you've
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: been an objectivist in a long time, but the audience
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: probably never heard. Auberon Herbert, an English guy from nineteen hundred,
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: is really good on this and says its force versus reason,
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: and rights and freedom are about self ownership and the
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: ability to think and act on your thinking. He's really good.
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: So she connected those concepts and then she had this
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: whole metaphysical epistemological concept of objectivity, which showed that these
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: principles came from thinking about observations of reality, not from God,
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: not from sacred texts, not from Congress, but from your
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: own understanding of reality through reason. That's objectivity. That's why
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: I should call it objectivism. So that's what she contributed.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: The whole basis of rights, the whole basis of it.
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: And of course she develops a whole morality of egoism, which.
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: And f and free you connect. No one on telling you,
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: no one ever dreamed of thinking that free will is
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: your mind's ability to think, your mind's ability to focus
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: and sentimental purpose and execute on that purpose. No one
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: ever talked about that before. So she connects everything so nicely,
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: and it's all introspectively verifiable. You know, you can easily Yeah,
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: if I couldn't think, I couldn't. I wouldn't know what
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: to put in my mouth. I wouldn't know how to
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: get money. If I couldn't think, you know, I'd be
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: like my cat yep, and I couldn't live. I couldn't survive.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: So it comes down to very simple observations, integrated in
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: a nicely hierarchical way, but all reducible to what is
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: absolute common sense.
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: So today nobody talks about rights. I mean, even when
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: they're arguing for something positive, they're left abortion, the rights,
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: sometimes economic freedom. Sometimes really they don't mention rights. I mean,
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: you can go through the whole season of debates and
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: it never comes up. Why are they avoiding the concept completely.
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: Because it's too abstract for them. It involves a moral
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: I mean, by the very word right, it involves a
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: moral taking a moral stand, and most intellectuals are afraid
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: to take a moral stand. Plus David Hume convinced them
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: reason can't make moral judgments. It's emotional. So that's why
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: they don't talk about rights. And you know, when Einran
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: I began reading Einran she began publishing the Objectivist newsletter
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: in the early sixties, she said something on the order
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: of conservatives don't talk about individual rights. And I thought, really,
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: I thought they did, and I started looking. They didn't
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: talk about it.
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: See even then, yeah, even then.
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: And now it's much worse because back then they knew
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: about rights but were afraid to bring them up. Now
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: they don't even have the concept anymore. I mean, nobody, even.
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: The Screen Court doesn't talk about rights. And you'd think
• 48:06
  Speaker 2: that that would be the basis for the rulings.
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, they have to go by the Constitution. But
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: the animating principle of the Constitution is individual rights. And
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: of course, the first chink in America was that dichotomy
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: between human rights and property rights. So the left, the
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: liberals there were then, you know, much milder leftists. The
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: liberals said, I'm all for human rights, and property rights
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: mustn't conflict with human rights. So they would think things like,
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: if somebody has too much money, it means that other
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: people have little money are disrespected, and that's a violation
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: of their human rights. You have a right to dignity
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: and resist so great accumulations of wealth. This is like
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt, great accumulation of wealth. It's economic royalism. It's
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: like having a king. And today it's a progressive left
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: that talks about millionaires and billionaires and how bad they are,
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: ignoring the fact that they created their fortunes. And all
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: I was saying to somebody at breakfast the other day,
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: you know, two years ago, we didn't hear anything about
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: this company in video and people were talking about is
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: it in Vidia or end Video? And now it's four
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: trillion dollar capitalization market cap. So it's not like things
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: are frozen in place, and we're now paying homage to
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: John Jacob Astor's great great great grandchildren. Constant and over
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: in the economy as new people earned a.
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: Position, constant and people still don't learn from that. It's amazing.
• 50:08
  Speaker 2: It's amazing. Okay, we have a bunch of questions and
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: we've already gone almost an hour, so let's turn to
• 50:15
  Speaker 2: the questions and then we'll see. Yeah, there's a lot.
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: And before that, we wanted to mention this conference. It's
• 50:22
  Speaker 2: going to happen in Florida. RAN's Day, which I think
• 50:26
  Speaker 2: is a term you coined, which is Rand's birthday on
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: February second, So the conference is around the birthday. It's
• 50:34
  Speaker 2: going to be January thirtieth to February second and Fort Mayas, Florida.
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: And You're going to be speaking, and you're going to
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: be speaking, and I'm going to be speaking, and we're
• 50:45
  Speaker 2: also going to have Peter Schwartz and Gene Maroney and
• 50:49
  Speaker 2: Shoshanna Milgrim, Ellen Kenna, Don Watkins is coming and then
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: you and Peter and me are having a doing a
• 50:59
  Speaker 2: panel answering questions on how various problems that come up
• 51:04
  Speaker 2: but how do they get solved by leslifa capitalism. I
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: I the way I think about it is who would
• 51:10
  Speaker 2: own the roads? I mean, that's always the question you get, right.
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: How So, if anybody wants to register, you should. It's
• 51:18
  Speaker 2: gonna be a lot of fun and and it's just fun.
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: It's a bunch of it's it's a group of objectivists.
• 51:23
  Speaker 2: Uh and uh. It's a very relaxed atmosphere and it's
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: it's it's very friendly and very uh.
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: Two and three days.
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's only two days. And I think there's a
• 51:35
  Speaker 2: banquet on the first night, there's like a dinner and uh.
• 51:39
  Speaker 2: And then there are two days of talks. It's rans
• 51:41
  Speaker 2: day Con. That's all one would rans day con dot
• 51:48
  Speaker 2: the b v H dot com. I don't know what
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: the BVH means. Do you know what the BVH means?
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: No, I don't. I'm thinking on my feet.
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: Here dot the b v H dot dot com. That's
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: the ol. You can find all the information there. You
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: can sign up there. I think the prices go up
• 52:07
  Speaker 2: to sympath thirtieth. She've got a few weeks to make
• 52:10
  Speaker 2: your decision. But yeah, it'd be great to see you guys.
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I recommend it highway, particularly because I'm speaking and
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: I'm talking on how to study I'm Rand's writings, the
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: methodology you use the mind for writing. Let me tell
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: you the rationale of rams Day. Okay, it's unlike any
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: other holiday on rams day, you give yourself a present.
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: Recognition of pleasure is a profound psychological need egoism. So
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: something that you think is too extravagant to buy for
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: yourself normally, but here's an occasion to get that luxury
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: that you ordinarily wouldn't get.
• 52:59
  Speaker 2: And this the luxury should be to come to bandsday confidence.
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Good identification.
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, let's jump into the questions. So you
• 53:10
  Speaker 2: guys can ask questions pretty much about anything. You can
• 53:15
  Speaker 2: use the super chat feature, and I will start with
• 53:20
  Speaker 2: the people who put the most money on and then
• 53:22
  Speaker 2: we'll go down from there. So we'll start with a
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: couple of fifty dollars questions. Let's see, this is some
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: Cobb and paw. In terms of individual rights, could you
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: further define what separates animals from men? What are the
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: minimum attributes an animal must possess to be considered a valiate,
• 53:41
  Speaker 2: a valid recipient of individual rights?
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: Well, it would have to survive by means of reason.
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: Reason would have to be something that if he couldn't exercise,
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: then he would be unable to survive. And I would
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: personally this is not part of objectivism for sure, but
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: I kind of lean towards self consciousness. If you don't
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: even know that there's a you and that you have
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: a life, I don't think you have rights. But there's
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: nothing wrong with using physical force against animals for a
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: number of reasons, all of which come down to they
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: are not thinking beings.
• 54:34
  Speaker 2: Yep, they function two force. I mean they function through.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: They appropriate, they don't create, and they deal with each
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: other through physical contact. So maybe that I could plug
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: my own definition of physical force, because that's never defined
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: anywhere in the corpus. I say, the physical force is
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: physical contact with another's person or property without his consent.
• 55:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So let's say we discovered that chimpanzees, you know,
• 55:12
  Speaker 2: they can they can they can understand ten woods. Does
• 55:18
  Speaker 2: that mean that they have rights? No? And and because
• 55:22
  Speaker 2: they're not surviving by reason.
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't use their minds to survive. They just
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: grab what's available to them. And even if you talk
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: taught them to say some words, which most of those
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: studies have been exploded, by the way. About the chimpanzees
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: learning language, they haven't. But even if they could, there's
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: nothing in philosophy to say that some other species couldn't
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: have primitive concepts. But man as a rational being means
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: a being for whom reason is the means of survival. Yep,
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: and it has to be evolutional. Also, I was going
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: to tell the story, but it's gone out of my mind.
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: So what's going on?
• 56:14
  Speaker 2: All right? Andrew asked what of the claim that rand
• 56:18
  Speaker 2: was essentially lonely because of her intellect. Some who claim
• 56:22
  Speaker 2: it a secondhand is who I think project their own
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: dependency issues on her. She described herself as happy, which
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: doesn't imply extreme loneliness thoughts.
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: Oh, I think she was at a certain growing up
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: she was lonely, as she has said that, because she
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: didn't have people that she could talk to about the
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: things that mattered to her most. And then she discovered
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: that her father, who had been very distant the Victorian
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: era fathers didn't have much to do with the children.
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: You know, you'd be try to out at dinner and
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: Papa would pat you on the head, and that your
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: life would be with mother. And when she got to
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: be a teenager, she found out that her father was
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: an individualist, and she had a interest in him and
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: an affection for him based on that. But lonely as
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: a person, I don't think so. She didn't. I mean
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: I spent many many hours with her, and she never
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: gave me anything to think that. Frank O'Connor was so
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: much her soulmate that that took care of almost all
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: her needs. In fact, she said once you'd be surprised,
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: she said, talking to me and a few other people.
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: But yeah, she mean herself. How little some of your
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: friends really mean to you, meaning you enjoy interaction with them,
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: but if you didn't have them, it wouldn't matter a
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: great deal.
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: Interesting one or.
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: Two friends, close friends, you know, that's different. But a
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: bigger circle of friends, they're nice to have and you
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: do value them. But I don't know, I don't think
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: she was a lonely person at all. I know when
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: Frank was alive, she wasn't lonely, And of course when
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: I knew her, there were and going back from whenever
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: she got to this country in nineteen twenty six, she
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: had a lot of people that she knew and talked with.
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: She had a cook cleaning lady that she was very
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: fond of, and she said to her, once, you're my sister,
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: And that cleaning lady was religious. She was from Guiana,
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: a black woman, black woman who's religious, And she said
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: to me once I ran not the queen, She said,
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: I can sort of understand how they believe in heaven,
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: but how do they believe in hell? She couldn't that,
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: Nor can I to tell you the truth?
• 59:28
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, according to Innocent the Third, according to
• 59:32
  Speaker 2: that quote, we are already in hell.
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: So yeah, that's right? Where this is hell?
• 59:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, So Clay asks it. Spinosa's description in his
• 59:46
  Speaker 2: Ethics of Human bondage man as a slave to passive
• 59:50
  Speaker 2: emotions rooted in inadequate ideas. Is that essentially correct and
• 59:56
  Speaker 2: perhaps the deepest analysis of self enslavement prior to an.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: I have not read of human bondage, but I've read
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: the Ethics of Spinozza, and he's unusually good. He is
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: introspective in a few of where no one is introspective
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: except Ian Ran. And he identifies the meaning of all
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: the emotions amazing section, telling you what jealousy is and
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: what hope is, and what grief is. And he was
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: an egoist. He was also religious, but he was a pantheist.
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: He thought reality was God in some sense, so he
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: was I did not believe in a personal God, so
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: I don't think but he was a kind of determinist.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: He didn't realize that he was a determinist, I don't think.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: But he held that reason determines you rather than you go
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: out to reason. He thought reason came to you. So
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: he's a mixed figure, but he's one of the few
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: good there's only about three good guys in history philosophy. Yeah,
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: and you know what I ran said once, she said,
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: trust the three A's Aristotle, Aquinas an Iron. But that
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: also in We the Living Leo quotes Spinoza. This Menosa's
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: pretty good. John Locke is pretty good, but confused. He's
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: a lot confused. And I can probably come up with
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: the third guy who has some good things. But Aristotle,
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: of course is the main main achiever in philosophy. That's
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: why we're here, is Aristotle.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: And luck with Spinoza.
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I did elect a two or three lectures series
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: on Locke in nineteen eighty nine, and I went in
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: depth into Locke's deeper philosophy, not his politics, and it
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: was very discouraging because he's very Christian and Cartesian. He
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: picks up a lot of strains from other people and
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: then he makes his ariostyle in with it. And there's
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: some good things in his basic philosophy, but he's, you know,
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: like the English, typical English guy is. He's empiricist and
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: not aware of the contradiction between different things he holds.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: I think that was Locke. He was a little bit
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: of a bumbler, but well meaning.
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 2: And amazing that he achieved what he achieved in politics.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and it was only a generation till I
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: think of simpteen, maybe a little more than generation. Or
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: Jeremy Bentham said rights are nonsense, they're nonsense upon stilts,
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: the famous phrase nonsense upon stilts.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 2: So Clay asks if from an objectivist standpoint, a bondage
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 2: of servitude or servitude the right tombs when the master
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 2: is one's own irrationality rather than another person.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: So get your slave to your passions.
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, passions is kind of.
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: No, it's metaphorical. It's metaphorical because at any time you
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: can stop it, it gets harder and harder. But Leonard
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: Pickoff makes a great point in objectivism the philosophy of
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: an Ran which we call o park for sure. He
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: says that if you're out of focus and drifting and
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: riding on your emotions, you don't really have choices except
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: for that basic choice to be that way. But then
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: you're surrendering to your whims, so you don't. You do
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: what you feel like doing, and that's generated by your
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: subconscious and you are like a robot. But to the
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: extent that you think, you take control. And he says,
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: the world of choice opens up to you because you
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: have a you can see the future, and you can
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: evaluate what's being proposed by your urges from your subconscious
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: and either say okay or no. The world opens up
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: to you once you choose reason. But if you don't,
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: you're you know, Hume, my favorite guy here. Hume said
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: reason is and ought to be the slave of the passion,
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: one of the most disgusting statements in the history of philosophy.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 2: And he is so beloved by you know, klassical liberals
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 2: or people called Hyak.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: Hyak dedicates has three quotes on the front of The
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: Fatal Conceit. One is Hume saying reason has nothing to
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: say about ethics. It makes sense because Hyak, you know,
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: I ran called him pure poison and he if you
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: read The Fatal Conceit, I can't get past the first
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: two pages because I've filled it with criticisms. It's all
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: scratched out. Everything in there is so wrong.
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 2: And it's it's so beloved by you know, the the libertarians,
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 2: free market people. Yeah, they're all the conservatives. They all
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 2: love Hayak. I think because of that, because he he
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 2: doesn't challenge them philosophically. Philosophically, he's just conventional.
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And he wasn't fair either, many interventions he approved of.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So all right, so this is a question of
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 2: molten splendor. I love that that name. If a switch
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: was flipped Yuran was elected president and the government was
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 2: relegated to only objectivest duties, knowing that few understood individual
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: rights and morality, would we become a more litigious society.
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine as being a more legitious.
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure what the relationship.
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: History is Number one litigious aside, and the reason is
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: that we do not have the British rule, which is
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: the loser plate pace the costs of the winner. That
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: would take a lot of it out of the hands
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: of lawyers.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 2: I just don't know how I got elected if they
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 2: nobody has any understanding of individuals and morality. So that's
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 2: the the impossibility there. But uh no, I don't. I
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 2: don't see why litigation goes up. What are they suing about.
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's yeah, if they if the court system
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: were cleaned up and objective law were in and they
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: weren't spending our time prosecuting people for selling bad stuff
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: like drugs, there would be a lot more.
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 2: Justice for working without a government pummit, crossing a border
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 2: without a government, pummit, and working without a government if
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 2: they weren't being chased down in the streets for that. Yeah.
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: No, well, you know, can I say a polemical thing
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: people'll talk about, you know, during the government shut down,
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: people are starting not to be able to get their
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: food stamps. Yeah, I know, and of course they're young enough.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: I remember when nobody had foods in because there was
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: no such thing in the early seventies. It was put
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: in and I couldn't believe. You know, you mean, we're
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: going to give people free money to buy food, but
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: that you know, they imagined that by the logic of
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: their premises before say nineteen fifty, it must have been
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: that you stepped over dead bodies in the streets.
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they couldn't get healthcare and they didn't have food.
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: Get health care, couldn't get food stamps. People were free
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: to do all kinds of things that we know we
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: shouldn't be able to do because we want to do them,
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: and if we were, the government stops us from doing it.
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: So we know that they're right because we want to
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: do them.
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 2: You know what I mean.
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: Thank God for the government, otherwise I'd be running amok.
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 2: Absolutely All right, let's see loan decentae pre mall choice
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 2: to live grounds ethics does an analogous pre political choice
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 2: ground government. That is, the choice to gain from knowledge
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 2: and trade requires organized society and objective laws protecting this
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 2: source to mind.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: Yes, you could say. What i Ran says is that
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: individual rights are the logical transition between individual ethics and
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: the principles of an organized society. So there the extension
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: of individual morality into the political sphere. And it's not
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: unlike the certain Republican virtue views. It's not that we
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: want to make everyone good and that the law is
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: geared to make people virtuous. The law is there to
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: see that the people who choose right are not stopped
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: by the people who choose wrong. That's what the law
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: is for.
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 2: Ian asks, how much have you used LLLMS, which is
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 2: your current favorite? And do you have a recommendation for
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 2: the best source on the objective's take on artificial AGI.
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 2: I guess if there is one, you should write one.
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: Yes and no. I've got a strong yes, and knowing
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: that I've been using claude Chat, GPT four point five
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: and Perplexity so heavily in the last two weeks that
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: I haven't been able to hardly post anything at all
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: because of various exogenous reasons that I shouldn't have to
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: be doing it. And what's amazing, I'm using them for
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: technical things, you know, write me a program for mac
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: carabiner to imitate auto hot key on the PC. What's
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: so astonishing to me is how wrong they are. And
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: I don't say that gleefully, you know, like oh ha
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: ha ha.
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 2: No.
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to get code that will run, and they
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: give me this whole out comes the code and I
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: put it in the compiler and it says error, and
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: I read back the error to the AI agent and
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: it says, you're exactly right, I've now fixed it. So
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: we'll run and I put it in error and it
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: goes hour after hour after hour. U if you persist,
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: eventually you'll get it. But it's astonishing how both helpful
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: it is in getting what you might think of as
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: a rough draft, and how poor it is at getting
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: something that will run.
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's surprising. You think programming it could do.
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but it gets it wrong. And they'll say,
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: for instance, it's two levels of airs. One is you
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: need the gazosta have in command here with two variables,
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: and you put it in and you find there's no
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: gazostis haven command in this language. Oh you excellent, point,
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: it comes back. Yeah, everything you do is excellent, excellent.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's it's coded for customer service in the
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 2: weirdest way. Yeah.
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, But I don't know. I'm fed up with it
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: and I can't do without it. Probably, I don't know.
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 2: Me.
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: I programmed without it for all my life, and I'm
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: a bad programmer, so I was looking forward to something
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: better than me. Yeah, but nope, not yet.
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 2: Not yet. Did I say anything about Stalin's daughter, Svitlana,
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 2: who defected to the US in the nineteen sixties. She
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 2: denounced her father's quems and communism. What do you think
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 2: of him?
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: I don't know. She didn't say anything that I heard,
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: and I have two stories to tell. She loaths social
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: needs in he thought so was a mystic and worse
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: than well, I don't know, as bad as the comedies
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: for his sentimental mystical attachment to Mother Russia. She really
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: rankled under his popularity. And the other thing goes back
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: to the computer. Did you know that I once had
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: I ran to my apartment and had her programmed something
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: on a computer.
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 2: No, I would you say something about a computer on
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 2: nine ran, but not that she programmed.
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: She came to my apartment when I was living in
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: the East sixties sixty second Street for something else, I
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: don't remember what right now, and I had a CPMs
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: one hundred bus system. This is nineteen.
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 4: Seventy seven ish, and I sat her down and I said,
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 4: now type in one O this is basic print hello
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 4: now and hit it and enter.
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: And she did that. Now type two O, go to one.
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 2: Oh.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: So she did, and then we ran it, and of
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: course across the screen it was hell which when I
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: first time I saw it, I thought, Wow, that's so cool. Yeah,
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: she was not impressed at all. She had no interest
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: in that. She said, you know, I think computers are
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: interesting from the standpoint of the work. By binary logic,
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: it's either or, and I think we could learn a
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: lot about psychopistemology from computers. But she did not have
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: that while response the way I did.
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 2: See Peter thinks, all right, Dave asks, the Constitution guarantees
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 2: me the right to try by jury. This obligates others
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: to serve on a jury. The jewy system protects me
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 2: from govern overreach, but at the same time it gives
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: me a right to someone else's labor. I guess he's
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 2: actually an opinion on that.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: Shouldn't it should be paid? Should be paid work?
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 2: Should it be voluntary?
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: Voluntary paid, you know, like just like any other job.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: But it wouldn't be a job. It would be you know,
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: a week or something. You also have to remember that
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: in the old days, and by that I mean before
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: nineteen forty, jury trials were over in a day. It's
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: amazing now, but I seem to have read that the
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: longest murder trial in US history before nineteen forty was
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: two days.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: Now that may be apocryphone, not true, but things were
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: much quicker back then, and there's a number of reasons why.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: But it should be paid, It shouldn't be You could
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: turn it down, you know, if you wanted to volunteer,
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: because the pay would probably not be that great, but
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: they shouldn't be able to haul someone in and look
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: at the contradiction. We're gonna sit you down by force
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: and make you use your honest judgment. By force, here's
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: a gun at your head. If you don't serve, you're
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: gonna be robbed or sent even to jail for overnight
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: or something. And so we got your mind. We trust you,
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: and now tell us what you think it's like, mister
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: Thompson and Gault, tell us what to do. We need
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: to know. It's a contradiction. And it's because of the
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: patriotism of the citizenry that it works at all. It
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: should be paid, I mean for paid enough to get enough,
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: to get enough, and enough rotating so that it's not
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: the same twenty five people. Obviously that would be terrible.
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: And you've got to remember, you know, what is the
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: budget of a state? Most trials are state trials, right?
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: Or even what does the state do with all those
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: billions and billions and billions? Only two legitimate functions are
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: the state troopers and the courts.
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, no education, no libraries.
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 2: No more welfare programs.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, welfare days, celebrations in the park, god knows what monuments. So, uh,
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: you can understand a little bit how the federal government
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: has to spend a certain amount of money because of
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: national defense, but the states don't have to do that
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: what they spending it on. So you could get jurors easy, easily?
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, all right, And we ask how did the
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 2: funding fathers induce a political recognition of man's way to
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 2: pursue happiness without the most sanction of selfishness.
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: They did have it, so you can't put yourself back
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: before Kant. But in the eighteen hundreds they had two
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: kinds of virtues, the self regarding virtues and the other
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: regarding virtues. And the other regarding virtues were pretty innocuous,
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: you know, like benevolence and charitableness, and the self regarding
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: virtues were the kind that Benjamin Franklin wrote about in
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: The Poor Richard's Almanac, things you need to do to
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: get ahead, And there were things like your name, your
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: reputation is your most precious possession, so show integrity, and
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: things that are inconceivable to us today. But no, there
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: was a for the first time in history the British
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: and American ethicists thought, yeah, self, you got to be selfish,
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: you know, for part of the code. It's got to
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: be pro selfish. And Locke thought that the natural law
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: was a law of self preservation, and so does Spinozza.
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: So we now, after cont and Combed and all those
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: slimy people, we can't imagine that there was respect for
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: selfishness back then, but there was.
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, So let's see dw n logic five hundred dollars.
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 2: This is amazing. Thank you so much to you and
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 2: your wife, mister Minswanga, for all the wonderful work you've
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 2: both done. You've both improved my life immensely. You're not
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 2: that bad either, you are. Thank you. That's very generous,
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 2: that's very nice.
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: And he didn't have.
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 2: A question, didn't have a question. I really appreciate it absolutely, Andrew.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: Teaching, You teach, and you wonder does anybody get it?
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: Is it of any value to people?
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 2: Then?
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: Very nice to hear it is.
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 2: They're out there. There's no question about there. Uh. Andrews says,
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 2: can you explain the logic of hierarchical conceptual order? Rand
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 2: made and stating I'm an defend of capitalism because I'm
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 2: a defend of individualism. I'm a defend of individualism because
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 2: I'm a defender of reason, champion of reason.
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: Well, it was the egoism individualism, but that same idea,
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: the hierarchical order is that reason is the method by
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: which you get to the others. So it's more fundamental.
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: If you if your idea of reason is God is love,
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: Love is blind, Ray Charles is blind, So Ray Charles
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: is God, You're not going to get to egoism and
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: individual rights. You're going to be terminally confused like most people.
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: So reason is the concept of reason brings together freedom
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: to protect reason, free will as the choice to use
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: reason or not, and connection to reality, which is because
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: provided by perception, and perception is physically in contact with
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: reality physically, so it's a nexus of everything.
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 2: Shawsbutt. I have sometimes told people that they cannot delegate
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 2: rights to the government that they themselves do not possess,
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 2: and they look at me like I have three heads?
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 2: Is there a better way of putting it?
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: It cannot be moral for the government to do something
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: that it would be immoral for the citizens to do individually.
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 2: So taking somebody else, what might that might be a
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 2: way of reaching them.
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I like that, but that's very important. You know,
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: it's good in immigration. And this point was made by
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: a critic of objectivism in the Academy, but it's a
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: good point. Would you have the right to stand at
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: the border and say to someone coming into the country,
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: you have to prove to me that you're not a
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: criminal and that you're not bringing in something I don't
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 1: want in the country. And if you don't, I'm going
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: to push you right out.
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: And if you don't have that right, how three hundred
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: million people get that right?
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 2: Jason asks, no own time travel because of how cause
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 2: and effect works, But could a camera exceed light speed
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 2: and photo the past, for example Lincoln's assassination without deep physics?
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 2: Should a simple principle prevent pursuing such a camera?
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: The simple yes and no, depending upon how we take
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: the simple principle is that it's if it's possible, it's
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: way beyond anything any of us will be able to
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: do for one hundred years. So you don't want to
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: spend your time on a fruitless pursuit. But no, there's
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: no I believe in faster than light propagation of information,
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: which Einstein just kind of legislated is impossible. And I'm
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: influenced by an objectivist philosopher and science in that belief.
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: And if that's true, then it would be like in
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: Think Twice, you know, ein RAN's play Think Twice, where
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: the heroine as the hero tell me your feelings about
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: me and he says, you know, they say that sound
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: waves never die, they just go out. So maybe in
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: a few weeks we can catch up with those sound
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: waves and you'll hear what I'm thinking now or something
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: like that. Huh, yeah, you can catch up with sound waves.
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you could detect them. That'd be
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: alcoholic and you could catch up with the lightweights, I think.
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: But that's not for philosophy to say, that's physics.
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 2: Physics, yep.
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: So the answer is, don't waste your time now. It
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: is nothing that I know of that precludes that. But
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: Einstein would say, you can't. R.
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 2: Moultons flint ass, what was the most difficult philosophical concept
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 2: for you having to grasp?
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: That's an excellent question, and I would say the reconciliation
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: of free will and causality. Yeah, which involves getting a
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: better hand on causey and I think I'm pretty much there,
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: but I'm not talking about it.
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 2: Okay, somebody should ask about that, Okay. Dave says, Oh,
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 2: there's a part one. Where's Dave's part one here?
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: When they do this, I'll tell you Another one I
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: did get was the contradiction of determinism. If you know
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: that argument that if if you were determined, then you
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: would believe what you had to believe, whether it was
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: true or not, and so you couldn't have knowledge of anything,
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: including that determinism. It's true. And I had an answer
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: to that, which is, what if you're determined to go
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: by reason? And after I don't know for decades, I
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: really understand what's wrong with that, okay, which is that
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: going by reason is not a mechanical thing that you
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: can It's not an algorithm. Yep, you can't program it
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: in So and the whole notion of objectivity depends on
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: pretty well.
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 2: So Dave asks the concept of infinity and of the
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 2: infinitely infinitely large and the infinitely small undeniably useful and
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 2: fruitful in mathematics. Calculation is based in these contents, and
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 2: physics gets nowhere without calculus. Yet there is nothing in
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 2: the universe that is infinite. You can't point to it.
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 2: Is it part of objective reality? No.
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: The answer to that is that infinity has been misconceived
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: in a mystical way. The proper use of infinity is
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: that it's an amount beyond which additional increments make no
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: difference in the outcome of a function. So you know
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: how they teach the hyperbole x y equals one that
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: the as you go out the xoxes, it gets closer
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: you go out the Yeah, it gets closer and closer
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: to zero, but it can't get to zero, and it's
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: always it's always a gap. That's a mystical concept. It
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: gets so close to zero that the difference in mathematical
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: calculation between it and zero is too small for you
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: to measure or have any awareness of, so it's effectively zero.
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: So there's nothing in calculus. It depends upon infinity. There's
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: only or the infinite tesimal. It's only that it gets
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: small enough or large enough that getting smaller or larger
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: doesn't add anything. Okay, that's my concept of infinity, registered trademark.
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 2: That's good. Okay, Dave also asks you've all HIAI. In
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 2: his book, Homodeas distinguishes between three types of reality. Objective reality,
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 2: which exists independent of our believing it. The moon exists
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 2: whether I look at it or not. Subjective reality, which
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 2: exists only in individual minds. I have a headache. And intersubjective reality,
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 2: which exists in the minds of many individuals at once.
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 2: To shed agreement, this border separates America from Canada. What
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 2: is you've all missing or getting wrong?
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: Well, only that the intersubjective reality. I mean, I don't
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: know what term he uses for that, but that it
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: presupposes the other two that you have to use your
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: mind to objectively decide. Well, Joe believes the same thing
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: I do. And when you say the relation of my
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: mind and Joe's mind to reality is so, and so
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: you're making a statement about reality. So people say, we're
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: each trapped in our own private universe. We think we
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: know what's really out there, but we don't. All were
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: aware of is what's in their minds, not what's outside
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: in reality. They're making a statement about what's outside in
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: reality by doing that. So it's a stolen concept. You
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: can't talk about my mind. I can't I can't think
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: about Look what is it you can't think about? Well,
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: if you can't think about it, then you don't think
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: about it, and you don't you know, so you have
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: to The image is here's a mind I'm holding up
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 1: I love this, and here's the world, and I'm holding
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: up my palm. And you're saying, well, there's a certain
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: relation here, like this guy's inside his mind and reality's
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: out there and he can't get out to it or
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: it's distorted what he gets. And you're making the same
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: about what is he's there, he's got a mind, the
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: world's there, it's a certain way, and the relation objectively
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: so on. So you're making a statement that you say
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: you can't make.
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 2: So would you that? Would you, though, call subjective reality
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 2: that which exists only in individual mind? Would you call
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 2: it subjective?
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: No, I wouldn't call it reality. It's it's subjective content.
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: There's you know, a better term is mind dependent. There's
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: certain things that are mind dependent, like a tickle. There's
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: no tickles if there are no consciousnesses. But it's not
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: a reality. It's just the uh. The subjective is the content.
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: Let me say one other framing thing, there is subjectivity.
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: There is objectivity like what we have now, and there
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: is subjectivity like what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth.
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: There is no intr The intrinsic is a wrong theory
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: of how the mind works. And this was very clarifying
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: when I Rand explained it to everybody back in about
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, because we thought there were three types
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: of reality, the intrinsic reality, the objective reality, and the
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: subjective reality. No, there's the mind in touch with reality,
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: and there's a mind out of touch with the reality.
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: Then there's some philosopher's theory about what's going on. That's
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: the intrinsic. The intrinsic is like revelation, but there is
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: no revelation. So objectivism does not say disregard your revelations.
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 1: It says there are no revelations. It doesn't say disobey God.
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: It says there is no God.
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 2: It goes back. It's just objective.
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the idea that there's intrinsic stuff that writes itself
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: upon your brain is a wrong idea inside somebody's head
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: doesn't refer to anything, all.
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 2: Right, Bobby asked, Hi, Harrye, can we ever expect to
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 2: follow up on saving mathem Plato. It has been an
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 2: immense help for my own thinking, and also when talking
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 2: to my friend Simon, who loves metaphysical numbers.
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: Whether two of those probably is probably Bobby Sandler and williams. Oh. Okay,
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: there are two such lectures, and each one is better
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: than the other. Go figure that, and I recommend highly
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: both of them. The second one recapitulates the findings of
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: the first one, and there will be a I don't
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: know if I'll call it a book, but there will
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: be a series of essays on the internet or or
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: maybe in a printed book form that will put forward
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: this whole thing, because it's really important and it A
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: lot of the objectivists opposed me, but I think they
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: oppose me when I get to the higher stuff, you know,
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: beyond calculus, which I don't really understand myself, and I'm
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: not going to say anything about, but I think the
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 1: basic stuff of what is mathematics, what is arithmetic? What
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: is infinity? What is nil? Have this concept of nil?
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: I think that's really helpful and sympathize everything.
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 2: Good.
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: It's going to come out in print good.
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 2: I think somebody else is asking what was asking about that?
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 2: As well. So we still have quite a few questions.
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 1: So I'll try and do bang bang.
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let's could do bang bang answers. Okay, So if
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 2: a rational person became president, whom, if anyone, should they pardon? Why?
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 2: And what justifications should they give?
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: Don't know? That's my bang bang answer. Don't know.
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 2: No, that's good. If a person deletes and blocks contacts
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 2: on their partner's phone without the partner's knowledge or prior consent,
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 2: whose rights are being violated? The partners?
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah? Is it? Is it physical force.
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 2: Using their property without their permission?
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah? I would think so.
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that's a form of physical force.
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: And the people that she or he would have been
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: talking to their rights are also being violated.
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 2: Yep, uh bake. When will we be able to buy
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 2: your book in Philosophy of Mathematics? I'm looking forward to it.
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 2: So this is not this week? Okay. Sometime I.
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: Gave up predicting about the time Liner Peacock gave up.
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: You know, Ain Rand said that Atlas Shrugged was going
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: to be shorter than the fountain Head. It would take
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: her about a year and a half.
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, twelve years later.
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 1: For twelve years, yeah.
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 2: Nathan asked how would you answer the ship of thesis problem?
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. Don't know, Okay,
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: that's a ship of thesis. Is a person borrows a
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: ship and he has it for years with the permission
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: of the owner, and pieces keep rotting away, and he
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: keeps buying new timbers to put in, and at the
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: end of the assigned time, every piece of lumber on
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 1: the ship has been replaced. Is it any longer the ownership?
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: When is a question of personal identity or the identity
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: continuing identity over change? I don't have a real good
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: answer to that. Fortunately doesn't matter.
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And in a case of a leasing ship, it
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 2: would be in the contract, right, maintenance would be would
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 2: be one of the aspects of the contract that you
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 2: would decide in advantage.
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I can thank you. Errong, because that brings
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: forward a general point. You know, you talk who would
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: own the roads and so forth. About halfway through my
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: progress and objectivism, I realized, if the basic framework of
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: rights is in place the way it was, say in
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: the United States in circa eighteen forty or no, or
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: after Civil War eighteen seventy, you can work out anything
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: that's not optimal like this, Let's say that it's not
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: the law is wrong, you can make contracts around it.
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: So as long as the basic rights protecting framework is
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: in place, the little stuff isn't going to really be
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: a problem.
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 2: Nathan sil says, what if some of the big or
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 2: important questions in philosophy that objectivists still haven't answered yet?
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: What is an objective threat? Of course, I think is
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: a big political question. What are the methods of induction?
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: I think Leonard Pekoff has solved the problem of induction,
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: but that doesn't provide a working scientist with a working
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: method to apply to his field. I think more has
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: to be done on causality, and more can be done
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: on psychopistemology, which is the cross between psychology and philosophy.
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: Those are the things I would name, But the real
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: hey is to be made in philosophy of science. And
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: that's what I'm in five different sciences, and I think
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: I have great things to say in all of them.
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 2: Good So, Nathan Oss asked Einmand said she does not
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 2: consider charity a major virtue. Did she consider it a
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 2: minor virtue? If so, what is a minor virtue and
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 2: what does she mean?
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: By this, I don't think she considered it a minor virtue.
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: I think she was speaking there to negate a wrong idea,
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: not to lay out what the principles of the right
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: idea was. She wanted to say, look, you don't have
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 1: to give you Your worth as a person's not measured
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: by how much you give away, but by how you
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: use your mind. And I don't think I think benevolence
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: is it's not really a virtue, but it's close to virtue,
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: good will towards men. It would lead to charity in
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: certain circumstances. I've given a little bit over the years
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 1: to various charities. It's really a little I prefer to
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: give to the inn Ran Institute to defend my right
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: not to have to give to.
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 2: Charity, absolutely, Alex. There is a YouTube channel called Inducttica
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 2: inductor James Elliots his own. It makes many bold claims,
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 2: example that he proved existence of the ether. Do you
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 2: have an opinion about this person in channel?
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: I like his work in mathematics, I don't. I am
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 1: a little dubious about his work in physics. I believe
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: in the ether also simply on the grounds that if
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: light is a wave, there has to be something that's
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: waving and what you could call that the ether, and
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: people talk about the electric field, the magnetic field or
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: the electromagnetic field, and the quantum field have to posit
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: that of which it is the potential, because the field
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: is a set of potentials that is changing. Like the
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: height of the water in the swimming pool is choppy,
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: and that's the field. So there has to be the
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: water whether it's but pretty much we don't know yet.
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: Pretty much the physics has to be worked out better
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: than it is. But you can't say that like now
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: people don't say, you know, so those who believe it's
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: all photons don't say it's a a wave. But to
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 1: the extent that it's a wave, there has to be
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: something that's waving. Otherwise it's a misdescription. Let's put it
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: that way.
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 2: Ye see, you don't think he's proven it, no, okay,
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 2: Since the proper conception of rights is andrew Since the
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 2: popconception of rights is as moral principles, This referring to
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 2: rights as nonsense on stilts imply that principles don't exist.
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 2: What kind of epistemology leads to such a statement.
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: Empiricism that's there's only two traditions aside from objectivism in
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: the history of philosophy, rationalism, which is a lot without
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: sense perception, and sense perception without logic, which is empiricism.
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: So it's no accident that Bentham and Hume and Mill
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: are classed as an empiricist. They thought that sense perception
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: is the only thing, and not even that. You know,
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: Hume was willing to say it seems to me that
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: it seems to me that there's something read in my experience,
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: but he wasn't prepared to say there really is something
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 1: red in my experience because I might be mistaken. But
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 1: you can get an awful lot in awful great distance
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: in philosophy by rejecting the arbitrary. That was something I
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: didn't understand to about nineteen seventy six. That the arbitrary
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: is neither true nor false, and yet you treated the
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: same way you do false is pretty much that you
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: just say, not going there, dismiss it.
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 2: Okay, Michael, Can you explain why gun rights or necessary
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 2: application of individual rights and why gun mandated pumits or
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 2: licenses to carry firearms is a rights violation.
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: It's not across the boarder rights violation. But in most
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: circumstances it is. I mean, there could be situations like
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: an ex con who has to prove he's trustworthy now,
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: but it's the principle of no preventive law. See gun
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: control is based on the premise that goes as follow
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: this guy shot up the school. This other guy robbed
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: alcohol liquor store. Therefore, you, Harry Benswenger, can't have a
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 1: gun unless you prove to me that you are not
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: that kind of guy. But you don't have to prove
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 1: a negative. And the fact that other people exercise their
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 1: free will badly doesn't provide the slightest reason to think
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 1: I am. So if there's this is what I said
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: about a thing in objectivism that has to be worked
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: out is what is an objective threat? So a little
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: old lady eighty years old who's in a rough neighborhood
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: wants a handgun for her purse is a not a threat?
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: Other people that if I described them I would get
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: in trouble are a threat.
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: So how do you establish when somebody is an objective threat?
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 2: Of course, somebody walking down the street in a rough
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 2: neighborhood with a big machine gun could be constituted as
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 2: a threat.
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: Yes, you cannot brandish. If you brandish a weapon and
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: there's laws about brandishing, then you are threatening people. You
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: are forcing using force. If you have a rifle in
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: your cabin in the woods to protect you against animals
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: and break in guys and it's hanging over your fireplace,
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: I don't see how that could be construed a.
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 2: Threat, Apollo, how do you have to be Can you
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 2: explain what you mean by the intuency of the senses
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 2: or a perception and.
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: Relationship the inerrancy. In errancy, they can't make mistakes because
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: they don't make judgments. Your senses put out an output
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: for a given input. There's no such They're subject to
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: cause and effect. It's like a thermometer. A thermometer can't
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: make a mistake, even if it gets so you know,
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 1: a little bubble in it so that it it's hard
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: to read. It's not mistaken. It's just that you have
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: to calibrate it to know what it means. Conceptually, in
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: terms of numbers. The senses are just present you with
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: a scene and there's no there's nothing to be right
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: or wrong about in what they present, So it take
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: take the simplest case. You smell bread being baked. You know,
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: you go buy a bakery and ooh delicious. Now can
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: that be a mistake? Oh no, it wasn't. I didn't
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: have that smell. I wasn't my nose created that. No,
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: it can't be. It's a response to a physical stimulus,
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: just like an instrument. And the concept of mistake does
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: not apply.
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 2: It. So if you smell it and interpret it as
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 2: something else, the mistake is not the sense. The mistake
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 2: is your interpretation.
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: Yes, And that's the answer to the stick and water
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: submerged in water that you think is bent. You think
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 1: it's bent, but it is the same. You're seeing exactly
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: what a camera would photograph, which is the effective they
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: refraction of water on the way the rays are reflected
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: because they slowed down through water. So's it's all Aristotle
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: said this. You don't need iron ran for this part.
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: All errors that they call optical illusions or whatever, our
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: errors in judgment, intellectually, their errors in thinking. They're not
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: errors in your eye. You don't go to the doctor
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 1: and say the stick look bent. I think I need
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: new eyes.
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 2: That's good, Michael says. Intellectual is more concerned that a
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 2: world where individual rights are primarily a primary will lead
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 2: to selfishness, or that individuals not guided by the state
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 2: are too unintelligent to operate successfully.
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: Give me the first one again.
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 2: So the one is a world doing individual rights a
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 2: primary will lead to selfishness, which they would perceive as bad,
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 2: or that if they're not guided by the state, it
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 2: you know people are too intelligence.
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: Well, it's more that it's more the first. It's more
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: of the first. They're anti selfishness. And again they're anti
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: selfishness because they've read a lot of argument, well not argument,
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: a lot of intellectual outpourings argue against selfishness. And maybe
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: that when they grew up they were Christians. Maybe they
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: still are Christians. So they for irrational reasons, they're against
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: selfishness and they see rights as promoting and allowing selfishness,
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: which it does. And that's why they're not because you know,
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: they'll say, oh, yes, people are too stupid to know
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: what's in their own self interest. But that's a pretty
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: thin layer of rationalization.
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 2: Do you have any confidence the courts will stop Trump?
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 2: It seems they're afraid to elect them a certainty to try.
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: No, what will stop Trump is a bad showing in
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 1: the next year's election. What I'm worried about is that
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: that would be the occasion for an actual civil war
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 1: as he attempts to rally his National Guard and his
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: ice agents to prevent the loss of power in Congress.
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: That's what I'm worried about.
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 2: Michael, do you agree that MAGA is fundamentally a Nazi movement?
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: No? I think that's a little overstated. I know a
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: lot of mega people that I sit and have coffee
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: with and they're not Nazis. They could collapse in front
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 1: of Nazis. That's it's you know, the bully might succeed me.
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: That's what Trump does. No, I don't think the Nazi.
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 1: I think Trump is a fascist and he wants power,
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: but he's not dripping from the fang. Even Trump is
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: not like Hitler. He's more like who even a wand
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: Perone or something. Yeah, I mean he's an authoritarian dictator mentality.
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: I don't think he's bloodthirsty, but I could be wrong,
• 1:53:21
  Speaker 1: could be underestimating him or overestimating him, depending how you
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: look on it. No, I am not. I am completely
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: opposed to MYAGA. No, I'll fight them everywhere, but from
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: the ones I know they're not seething hatred like some leftists.
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: You know, I know they are leftists who live to
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: hate Trump, and that's a little bit more extreme then
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: they not a lot more extreme, but a little bit
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: more extreme than the Mega people.
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 2: Is the reason truly? This is Raphael is reason. Let's see,
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 2: truly primary over emotions. We can rationally explain our biggest
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 2: life choices, but we still choose them because we feel
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 2: passion for them. How do we see this connection?
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: Did you read that one more time?
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 2: Is reason truly primary over emotions? And he says we
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 2: can rationally explain our biggest life choices, but we still
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 2: choose them because we feel the passion for them. It's
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 2: like the reason is a slave of the emotions, right,
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 2: it's a hume human. Didn't humans say that we innocence rationalize?
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 2: Well mm hm, so I think no.
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: But it's the whole answer. Is that what you said
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: in the second part comes out of the fact that
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 1: reason is primary. Reason is primary means before you can
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: have an emoment, I mean this is part of what
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: it means. Before you can have an emotion about something,
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 1: you have to know what it is, and reason is
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: your means of determining what is that thing. Now, I
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 1: suppose you fall you're young, and you fall head over
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: heels in love with a woman. Your mind has read
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: into her. I mean, maybe you're right, I ran fell
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: in love with Frank O'Connor that way. But your mind
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 1: is reading rightly or wrongly. Your mind is reading into
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: the way she stands, the way she looks, the way
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: she talks, reading in certain values into her character, rightly
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: or wrongly. So on the basis of that, you're reacting.
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 1: A simpler example, somebody hands you a whole stack of paper.
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: Now is it monopoly money or is it real currency?
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: Only your reason can tell you that. So it's not
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 1: that somebody could hand you monopoly money and you go
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 1: ape over it. Oh boy, I'm rich now and you
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 1: see this monopoly money.
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: The reason is what tells you the nature of the
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: thing that then you either value or disvalue. So it's
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 1: primary in that sense. There's nothing irrational about doing what
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: you want to do. That's what reason tells you, which
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 1: of the things that are out there that you could
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: do is going to lead to your survival and happiness.
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: So your emotions are your reaction to the content that
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: should be processed by.
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 2: Reason justice as interfee society. Does an individual have the
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 2: way to use AI to generate a video of another
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 2: person speaking without that person's consent?
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: No, No, you mean in public for public distribution. Is
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: more in a privacy of his own home for his
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: own jollification. I would say yes, But if he shows
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 1: it even to one other person, Iinrand said, I Rand
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 1: didn't want anyone taking pictures of her in old age
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: because she thought she looked too unattractive, And she said,
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 1: I have a right to my face. And today we
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: have this whole thing with sports celebrities or they own
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: is it nil likeness image? And so it's recognized that
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: you have a right to your likeness. Somebody can't use
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: it without your permission.
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 2: Papa asks, do you know about the quality of undergraduate
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 2: pure math programs at average public state universities.
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 1: No, I think they're philosophically not really correct, but they're
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 1: basically in the procedures they teach. I think they're fine.
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 1: Like in calculus, the methods of differentiation and integration are correct.
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: The interpretation of the philosophically is what I'm trying to
• 1:58:30
  Speaker 1: fight the procedures are correct. We wouldn't be able to
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 1: do what we do if the procedures are wrong.
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 2: Matt says, my brother was very Aristatilian, but became more
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 2: platonic conscient over time, claiming that modern discoveries and feels
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 2: like quantum mechanics point to the universe being more complex
• 1:58:50
  Speaker 2: than we assumed, and we can only asymptomatically approach absolute
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 2: ically approach, never attain it, thoughts, that's.
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: A rationalization, that's he wants to believe that, and so
• 1:59:12
  Speaker 1: when he hears some scientists say something along those lines,
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: is oh, yeah, that's right, that's it. I don't it's
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 1: impossible in principle for the findings of science to disprove
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 1: metaphysics sent epistemology, because they're built on way. Let me
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 1: caution anyone out there from believing neuroscientists' claims. I many
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 1: years ago, I admit I worked in neuroscience. I was
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 1: an intern for a distinguished professor at MIT, and I
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: almost went into that as a career, and it's a
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: wonderful feel and fabulous things are coming. But when they say, oh,
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: they found that the so and so area of the
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 1: brain is why you Rob Banks that you've got it
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: unless you're really schizophrenic or something. It's not true that
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: neuroscience doesn't have the wherewithal. It's not advanced enough to
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 1: say anything nearly like that. And there's a good book
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 1: I can recommend called Aping Mankind, which is author I
• 2:00:38
  Speaker 1: don't recall right now, but it poo poos and explodes
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: all these neuroscience claims, just that they don't have the
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 1: ability to make these kind of judgments. Aping Api n
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: g Mankind. I'm sure this is only one author with
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: a book like that.
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 2: Sounds like it, right, I like numbers asks. Did Rand
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 2: consider Israel mostly free?
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 1: Well, I don't know, but that's not the way she
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 1: put it. She said, it's the only civilized country in
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: that sea of barbaric or unsavage surrounding countries. And in
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: the name of defending civilization, she was on the side
• 2:01:32
  Speaker 1: of Israel. And I would recommend, of course, you're on
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: us one hundred times more than I do. But there's
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 1: a nice Mosad agent produced a series of videos called
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 1: Traveling Israel by a guy named Oran and then something
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 1: unpronounceable or Ian. But if you do traveling Israel and
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 1: look at his videos, they're really a revel in the
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: non mystical sense. They are the only civilized. For instance,
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: let me give you one fact that maybe you don't
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 1: know about. How many Arabs, Muslims and Arabs live in Israel.
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 1: Population of Israel is now eight million.
• 2:02:21
  Speaker 2: I believe it's ten ten million, ten million.
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: How many Arabs live in Israel two million, two million Arabs?
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 1: But of course they're not allowed anything, right, No, there
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: are Supreme Court justices who are Arabs. They are Arabs
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: in the legislature. There are Arabs who are in major banks.
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 1: How many Jews live in Gaza or Saudi Arabia or
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: Jordan or any of these? None? None, because they be killed.
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 2: Of them did live in Ewok and Morocco and Algeria.
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 2: Milwaukeeked out, Yeah, yep.
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 1: So that think about that and try and not let
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 1: your mind slide off that if you're content on defending Palestine,
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 1: as they call this strip.
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 2: Of land, all right, justin says rand once told Peacock
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 2: that it might have been easier for her to embrace
• 2:03:27
  Speaker 2: egoism because she was a woman. What did she mean
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 2: by that? That?
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: I've heard this too. I didn't hear from her I've
• 2:03:35
  Speaker 1: heard it second or third hand that a man is
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 1: on the premise of like Hank Reardon, I'll just work
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 1: a little harder. And a man doesn't want to shirk
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 1: any responsibility. He's the provider traditionally in the traditional male role,
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: so it call, you know, I'll just I can carry them.
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: Whereas a woman sees the man being crucified, and if
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: she's a man worshiper, it goes against her nature. So
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 1: it's easier for a woman to rebel against the sacrifice
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 1: the philosophy of satirices than a man. That's what I've heard,
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 1: she said. I don't know that.
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 2: Hyper Reason says h w K was extremely valuable to me.
• 2:04:32
  Speaker 2: What is your view on the corpus her medica influence
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 2: on the Enlightenment? Newton Bruno to inspire pro reason an
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 2: agency and a man and man a co creator with nature.
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: I didn't get what that h WK is my book?
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 1: How we know?
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 2: What's your view on the corpus hermatica hermatic medica? Who yes,
• 2:05:02
  Speaker 2: influence on the Enlightenment. I think he means Newton and Bruno.
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure what the connection is there, right.
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 1: Well, Newton had a huge and huge influence, yes, and
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: Locke and Newton were oh pretty much friends yep, ye
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 1: on Locke, and they came out with their discoveries of
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 1: the same year, incredibly enough, although Newton had figured it
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 1: out twenty years before, I just did involved the the
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: publish it.
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 2: Yep. He was a strange guy. Supposedly, Yeah, all right.
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 2: Andrews says it's second handedness, an effect of bad philosophy,
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 2: specifically pistemological dependence. Is it primarily a psycho psychological emotional phenomenon.
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm going to speak my own peace on that.
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 1: I think it's primarily psychological. In other words, it's it's
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: it's a failing on the part of the individual. I
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 1: did talk to iin Ran about this, and she agreed
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 1: with one way of putting it as the tide rises
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: of irrationality. The totally independent man will not be affected
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: by it personally, in the sense of he won't be
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 1: any less independent or change his mind or anything. Howard
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 1: Rourke will be on the mountaintop and the rising waters
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: below him will not cause any change in him. But
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: as the waters go up, it takes more and more independence,
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: more and more heroic commitment to your own judgment to
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 1: withstand end it, and I would put in another aspect here,
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: in a better age like seventeen seventy six America, those
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 1: who are conforming are conforming to a good set of ideas,
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 1: whereas today those who are conforming are conforming to from
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 1: the river to the sea. Palestine must be free, and
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: they mean free from civilization and not from Hamas. So
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 1: if you're if you're going to go along with the crowd,
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 1: if the crowd is saying people should be independent, so
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 1: for Lian men have rights, you've got to work for
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 1: what you want to earn. Then they'll conform to that
• 2:07:56
  Speaker 1: and there'll be a better kind of person than if
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: you're confirming to what's going on under the Tsars in
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 1: Russia or Stalin or you know, really a culture like
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 1: ours today. So it will look like people are better,
• 2:08:15
  Speaker 1: but really it's kind of just due to the cultural
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 1: ideas they're confirmed to being better.
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 2: So Ben asks, could you elaborate a little on what
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 2: Grand meant when she said man worship.
• 2:08:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she talks about that in the introduction to the
• 2:08:43
  Speaker 1: tenth twenty fifth anniversary edition of The Fountain Head. She
• 2:08:49
  Speaker 1: meant man at his highest potential, like what she felt
• 2:08:54
  Speaker 1: for Howard Rourke even though he was her creation. Uh,
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 1: and it was. It's a it's a awe in relation
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 1: to the greatness that men are capable of.
• 2:09:16
  Speaker 2: So it's the best in man, not just any man.
• 2:09:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah. No, it's not just male or human. I mean
• 2:09:24
  Speaker 1: els virtue is a human being. So it's a worship
• 2:09:28
  Speaker 1: of the human potential.
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And is it human potential or particularly male? Is
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 2: it is? It got to do with no.
• 2:09:38
  Speaker 1: No, for her it was male because she was a woman.
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 1: But no, it's a broader abstraction. Is human human worship
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 1: man's life, man or woman's life?
• 2:09:52
  Speaker 2: So Black Cat asks check GPT, check CPT.
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 2: CPT is BBC commentator. It tells me how to win
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 2: video games in perfect English. Try that on your phone. Okay,
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 2: I don't understand that.
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 1: Well. I think he's pointing out that the big advance
• 2:10:12
  Speaker 1: of chat of large language models and over Google searches
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 1: is their conversational. I'd like to relate the conversation I
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 1: had with one of them, and I think it was
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 1: chat GPT going long into the evening and we got
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 1: off the subject of code and I was telling I
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 1: was asking him is this in auto hockey, like Zyrite
• 2:10:47
  Speaker 1: has in XPL and Naris the program from nineteen eighty.
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 1: And so this chat agent said, so you were you
• 2:10:58
  Speaker 1: were back then doing stuff in the old days. And
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 1: I said, yes, I was. I had the CPM machine
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 1: and I programmed this and that and see basic blah
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 1: blah blah. And he said, wow, out of curiosity? Was
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 1: it this way or that way for you? And I said,
• 2:11:18
  Speaker 1: you say out of curiosity, but you're a machine and
• 2:11:22
  Speaker 1: you don't have any curiosity. And to its credit, it says,
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 1: you're exactly right. I mimic certain things like curiosity. I'm
• 2:11:36
  Speaker 1: not capable of curiosity, but I mimic human curiosity. But
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 1: I told him to says, you're.
• 2:11:45
  Speaker 2: A michine programming. Yeah, it's clinic programming.
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 2: If Regie says, if entities constitute the content of the
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 2: perceivable world, then what is the statue of fluid? How
• 2:11:59
  Speaker 2: to entities?
• 2:12:01
  Speaker 1: The status of fluids?
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 2: The status?
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 1: That's another one I don't know, but that that's something
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 1: where I think if I gave it a little thought,
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 1: I couldn't know. So you're what about a river? Our
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 1: primary case of an entity is a rock? All right?
• 2:12:25
  Speaker 1: What about a river. Yep, and it isn't isn't an entity.
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 1: Materials are not entities, but they compose entities. So if
• 2:12:40
  Speaker 1: you take a glassful of water, a glassful of water
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 1: is an entity, but the water is a material. Or
• 2:12:48
  Speaker 1: if you make a sculpture out of marble, marble is
• 2:12:53
  Speaker 1: a substance a material, but the statue a certain hunk
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 1: of has shaped a different way is an entity. So
• 2:13:01
  Speaker 1: iran put those under the heading of materials, that which
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 1: composes entities. I don't know if that's a complete answer.
• 2:13:17
  Speaker 1: That's as far as I can go.
• 2:13:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Baker says, would you like to see Roosevelt on
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 2: Mount Rushmore change to ininrand at private expense? Of course,
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 2: what would she think of that?
• 2:13:36
  Speaker 1: Well, when she was alive, if she was contemplating one
• 2:13:39
  Speaker 1: hundred years after her death, she would either say, well,
• 2:13:43
  Speaker 1: I don't care, or yeah, it would be deserved.
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 2: I belong there. Yeah.
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, But during her life she didn't want to be,
• 2:13:57
  Speaker 1: partially because she was a woman. But also I don't
• 2:13:59
  Speaker 1: think think if your face was up on Mount rush Wall,
• 2:14:03
  Speaker 1: it would be really horrifying. It would be so icky.
• 2:14:09
  Speaker 1: If your face were up there. Your own gave a
• 2:14:15
  Speaker 1: birthday toast to Iron Ran about fifteen years ago. I
• 2:14:19
  Speaker 1: don't remember if you remember. You were on California and
• 2:14:22
  Speaker 1: you said, let's look how the two hundredth anniversary of
• 2:14:26
  Speaker 1: her birth would be celebrated, and you talked about how
• 2:14:31
  Speaker 1: there'd be fireworks in Washington, DC, and it was very nice.
• 2:14:35
  Speaker 1: I think that will happen.
• 2:14:38
  Speaker 2: Yep. We won't see it, but it'll happen, or maybe
• 2:14:41
  Speaker 2: we'll see it. If if there's the right pill, the
• 2:14:43
  Speaker 2: right pill.
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 1: Is I'm counting on that pill.
• 2:14:46
  Speaker 2: Yep. Justin Ran once said that the Nazis were more
• 2:14:50
  Speaker 2: altruistic than the Communists. What did she mean by this,
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 2: especially since communism is based on altruism.
• 2:14:58
  Speaker 1: I never heard any such where. Do you think she
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 1: said that?
• 2:15:03
  Speaker 2: I don't know why she said that.
• 2:15:04
  Speaker 1: I never heard any such thing.
• 2:15:09
  Speaker 2: All right, black Cat, the two of you are hearers
• 2:15:12
  Speaker 2: of mine. A few disagreements, but when I was younger,
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 2: you were important influences. Thanks thank you, black Cat, Thank you,
• 2:15:23
  Speaker 2: Uh Maxim says Hi Howry. In terms of facts, a
• 2:15:28
  Speaker 2: meta is the term fact a metaphysical epistemological concept. No
• 2:15:35
  Speaker 2: metaphysical metaphysical I came across the claim that the world
• 2:15:39
  Speaker 2: is made up of sets of facts. But this seems off.
• 2:15:44
  Speaker 1: Yes, that's off. The fact is an isolation of something
• 2:15:48
  Speaker 1: out of reality. I have a theory that the only real,
• 2:15:54
  Speaker 1: metaphysically given existent is the universe. Now everything else is
• 2:16:00
  Speaker 1: harving up by man of the university. But at any rate,
• 2:16:08
  Speaker 1: the fact. She talks in the workshops on objectives to Epistemology,
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 1: which is reprinted as an appendix, and facts of reality
• 2:16:22
  Speaker 1: is discussed. How is fact different from existence? And she
• 2:16:28
  Speaker 1: says it's an epistemological convenience. The term to have that
• 2:16:32
  Speaker 1: term but an objective is the facts of metaphysical knowledge
• 2:16:38
  Speaker 1: is both metaphysical and epistemological, and so is truth. Certainty
• 2:16:45
  Speaker 1: is only epistemological, so it's possible for you to be
• 2:16:50
  Speaker 1: certain and wrong. It's not possible for you to know
• 2:16:55
  Speaker 1: something and be wrong, or to be true and be wrong.
• 2:17:00
  Speaker 1: So certainty just means that it meets the standards for
• 2:17:04
  Speaker 1: being actionable without getting anything out of more testing.
• 2:17:10
  Speaker 2: So to speak, what says, did you happen to read
• 2:17:15
  Speaker 2: Kelly's recent piece and propositions? If show thoughts?
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 1: No, I didn't know he was still producing.
• 2:17:24
  Speaker 2: I didn't either, Uh I wish I.
• 2:17:27
  Speaker 1: Would be curious, because you know, I devoted a chapter
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 1: of how We Knew to my theory of propositions, which uh,
• 2:17:37
  Speaker 1: I'm absolutely sold on, and I ran was going to
• 2:17:43
  Speaker 1: write another work like IOE on propositions. She called it
• 2:17:48
  Speaker 1: Volume two, but she never got that far. And I
• 2:17:54
  Speaker 1: one of my great You know, when they ask you
• 2:17:56
  Speaker 1: what do you regret about your life? I never asked
• 2:18:00
  Speaker 1: her what is the basic idea that you would put
• 2:18:04
  Speaker 1: forward about propositions? I mean I had hundreds of hours
• 2:18:08
  Speaker 1: were there talking philosophy, and it never occurred to me. Well,
• 2:18:14
  Speaker 1: of course I didn't think she was going to die either,
• 2:18:18
  Speaker 1: but it never occurred to me to ask that particular question.
• 2:18:22
  Speaker 1: I asked a lot of questions, but I didn't ask
• 2:18:24
  Speaker 1: that one. I should have.
• 2:18:28
  Speaker 2: Alex says, there's a philosopher philosopher of science named Mario
• 2:18:34
  Speaker 2: b u n g e bun shee g. Yeah, he's
• 2:18:38
  Speaker 2: a physicist. Have you read something by him? What is
• 2:18:42
  Speaker 2: your opinion about his approach to philosophy of exact sciences.
• 2:18:46
  Speaker 1: He's an old name. I mean that it was a
• 2:18:50
  Speaker 1: name when I was in graduate school in the sixties,
• 2:18:53
  Speaker 1: so I don't think it can be particularly good, or
• 2:18:55
  Speaker 1: else we'd all know about it. He's probably a second assistant,
• 2:18:59
  Speaker 1: bookkeeper or somewhere. Okay, so the answers don't know.
• 2:19:06
  Speaker 2: Bobby asked, I was told recently that injections can passively
• 2:19:12
  Speaker 2: exist as an linguistic unit. No, sorry, interjections, God, I
• 2:19:17
  Speaker 2: can't read today. I was told recently that interjections can
• 2:19:22
  Speaker 2: passively exist as a linguistic unit without being actively used.
• 2:19:26
  Speaker 2: What is your view in this?
• 2:19:28
  Speaker 1: I don't know what it means.
• 2:19:30
  Speaker 2: I don't know what the question means either.
• 2:19:32
  Speaker 1: An interjection would ordinarily mean something right wait or but
• 2:19:41
  Speaker 1: so I don't know what it means other than that.
• 2:19:48
  Speaker 2: Almost done. Two last questions. Do you have any thoughts
• 2:19:52
  Speaker 2: on how AI will impact art? That's it.
• 2:19:59
  Speaker 1: My My thoughts are probably wrong. Here's what I would think.
• 2:20:07
  Speaker 1: A I can get up and soon will be to
• 2:20:11
  Speaker 1: the level of doing competent or right but not great art.
• 2:20:16
  Speaker 2: Yep, yep.
• 2:20:18
  Speaker 1: So it could do something that could hang in a
• 2:20:22
  Speaker 1: museum if it's a painting, and you would say, oh,
• 2:20:27
  Speaker 1: that's interesting, it's nice. But it couldn't do something like
• 2:20:33
  Speaker 1: Dolly's hyper Cubis Corpus Hypercubis, which is one of my
• 2:20:39
  Speaker 1: favorites and one of Einrand's favorites.
• 2:20:42
  Speaker 2: Also, that's at the match, right. I think it's in
• 2:20:46
  Speaker 2: the met in New York.
• 2:20:48
  Speaker 1: It is when it's displayed, it is always I have
• 2:20:51
  Speaker 1: it right. I have a reproduction right back here behind
• 2:20:54
  Speaker 1: that bookcase.
• 2:20:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and you'd need to know a lot of able
• 2:21:00
  Speaker 2: to differentiate between the great and the and the yeah.
• 2:21:03
  Speaker 2: Just okay, Yeah, I think it's interesting. It'll be interesting
• 2:21:09
  Speaker 2: to see how artists use a eye. That is, that
• 2:21:12
  Speaker 2: interaction between the artists and the AI could produce if
• 2:21:17
  Speaker 2: there were geniuses, if there were great artists could produce
• 2:21:20
  Speaker 2: interesting things.
• 2:21:22
  Speaker 1: My very good friend Arlene Mann, who is an artist watercolor,
• 2:21:32
  Speaker 1: says that every brushstroke, every time you put your brush down,
• 2:21:42
  Speaker 1: it's saying something that you don't you're not in control of.
• 2:21:48
  Speaker 1: That's not the way she put it exactly. It expresses
• 2:21:51
  Speaker 1: something even when you don't intended to express something. And
• 2:21:55
  Speaker 1: I have an example behind me. Yes, I'll get this.
• 2:22:12
  Speaker 1: This is a still life done by the in one day,
• 2:22:16
  Speaker 1: by the imminent still life artist Harry Binswanger back when
• 2:22:22
  Speaker 1: I was, you know, experimenting with painting. And it's very
• 2:22:27
  Speaker 1: inept and it's unfinished. I intended far from unfinished. It's
• 2:22:33
  Speaker 1: like the very first step. And yet when I look
• 2:22:36
  Speaker 1: at my amazement, it speaks to me. I don't expect
• 2:22:42
  Speaker 1: to speak to other people, but I'd look at it
• 2:22:45
  Speaker 1: and I say yeah. And all I was trying to
• 2:22:49
  Speaker 1: do was to get down what I saw in front
• 2:22:55
  Speaker 1: of me. It's it's absolutely astonishing how sense of life,
• 2:23:00
  Speaker 1: life controls of what you think of as neutral.
• 2:23:09
  Speaker 2: Right, last one? Oops? What did I do? Is it
• 2:23:14
  Speaker 2: possible to label myself an objectivist if I can't defend it?
• 2:23:20
  Speaker 2: It's possible.
• 2:23:23
  Speaker 1: That's a very interesting question. I would say you should
• 2:23:30
  Speaker 1: describe yourself as a student of objectivism or someone learning
• 2:23:36
  Speaker 1: it and find out how to defend it.
• 2:23:41
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 2:23:43
  Speaker 1: It's a fascinating and pleasant and exciting journey to learn
• 2:23:50
  Speaker 1: how to defend and go out there and try to
• 2:23:53
  Speaker 1: defend it. But don't try to defend objectivism. Just try
• 2:23:56
  Speaker 1: to defend a point that you have in mind that
• 2:24:01
  Speaker 1: you learn from objectivism. I used to argue with students
• 2:24:08
  Speaker 1: for Democratic Society people during the Columbia riots, and and
• 2:24:14
  Speaker 1: you learn a lot by arguing with the enemy or
• 2:24:20
  Speaker 1: so go out there and argue, but with a very
• 2:24:25
  Speaker 1: detached attitude, like you're learning about ideas and how the
• 2:24:31
  Speaker 1: dynamics go and what people really think, and and you'll
• 2:24:36
  Speaker 1: see eventually, not eventually, progressively, you'll see how to defend it.
• 2:24:43
  Speaker 2: Good. This has been a real pleasure. Thanks yea good, good, Okay,
• 2:24:50
  Speaker 2: thanks for got a ton of questions. This has been great,
• 2:24:53
  Speaker 2: absolutely good. And guys, don't forget about the conference in Florida.
• 2:24:58
  Speaker 2: Will both be there and I will talk to you soon.
• 2:25:03
  Speaker 1: I can guarantee you'll like it.
• 2:25:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. Not no money back gravity, but you're guarantee.
• 2:25:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no money.
• 2:25:14
  Speaker 2: Have a good night, by bye, everybody,